How I Stopped Being One of Those Women Who Couldn't Drive

On a recent road trip with friends, my boyfriend, who was also our designated driver for the week, casually mentioned that he thought I was a "passive" person. Sitting in the backseat, my non-driver ID burning a hole in my pocket, I realized that he wasn't wrong.

I was 19 when I took my first road trip. We were driving down from New York City to Manchester, Tennessee to go to the Bonnaroo music festival—a round trip that racks up over 1,800 miles, or 26 hours. Equipped with driving playlists, car games, and snacks, we were a dream team. Except for one little thing: Of the four passengers in the car, only one of us knew how to drive.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Shortly before the trip, my boyfriend at the time (and our designated driver for the week) had said something that I couldn't push from my mind. He'd casually slipped into a conversation that he thought I was a "passive" person. Sitting in the backseat, I realized that the reason his comment stung the way it did was because it rang true. As I watched him try to fight off sleep or take one too many hits of a joint, swaying uncomfortably close to our neighboring lanes, I was incapacitated to do anything but nag. Pardon the heavy-handed metaphor, folks, but there I was letting him—making him—take the wheel, as I sat idly by.

Matthew Schneier recently sniffed out the non-driving adult trend in the New York Times. "It is a New York problem," shrugs one of his subjects. But the demographics of Schneier's interviewees state the obvious even if he won't: It is also a women's problem.

I grew up in Manhattan, which at least lent me an arsenal of excuses when bouncers and bartenders smirked at my non-driver ID card: My parents never had a car; lessons were expensive; plus, as a kid, my MetroCard served as better keys to the kingdom than a learner's permit ever could.

And I wasn't alone. To this day, at 23, most of my female childhood friends still can't drive. Yet, the older we get, the more I hear the excuses turn from practicalities to self-doubts. "I can't," "I'm sure I'd be terrible," and, "No one would be safe with me behind the wheel," are common refrains. My own personal fallback was a sort of self-deprecating, jokey pride, à la Lena Dunham's tweet: "To be clear: I can't drive and as I've aged it's gone from cute to pathetic to intriguing to tragic #strandedforlife."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

These are young women who've gone to Ivy League schools, traveled the world, and generally proven themselves tremendously capable. Yet the prospect of navigating a two-ton hulk of machinery through highway traffic becomes so daunting that they accept it as impossible. I've known a handful of young men in a similar predicament, but with one major difference: I've never heard them say they don't believe they could ever be so much as capable of getting a car from point A to point B.

This attitude problem isn't limited to driving—in fact, maybe that's just a problem for us city girls. For others, it might be math, sports, fixing a leak, or assembling their IKEA furniture. The point is, as young girls we were taught to internalize the "girls can't" attitude to such an extent that, even today, we often forfeit the ability to change the status quo.

"When we're aware of these negative stereotypes about how we should perform because of our membership in a gender group, just this awareness can be enough to derail our performance," says Sian Beilock, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and author of Choke, "One really easy way to deal with that is to just stop trying. If it's not important to you, then if someone says, 'Girls can't do math' or 'Women are bad drivers,' you don't care."

A study by the National Science Foundation found that in fourth grade, 66% of girls enjoy the sciences compared to 68% of boys; just four years later, girls are half as likely as boys to show an interest in STEM careers. Worse yet, research has shown that our insecurities are contagious: The more "math anxiety" female teachers and mothers display, for example, the more likely the girls who look up to them are to not only believe in negative stereotypes, but also to fulfill them.

I picked up one of my favorite feminist quotes from an unlikely source. In the movie Admission, Tina Fey's character pokes fun at her mom for fixing her own bicycle instead of sending it to the shop. Lily Tomlin delivers her retort in the form of an Erica Jong quote, "Did you know that women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness?"

I don't mean to say that if a man offers to take the wheel so that you can take a nap, you should accuse him of being a sexist pig. But every time we take advantage of the easy outs, we give our detractors more reasons to believe that we are, by nature, less capable.

When I interviewed for my current job at Esquire, I'd heard that the guy who'd be leaving my post had flown to Detroit to test-drive cars with some of our top editors. By that point I'd been casually learning to drive—saving up for lessons, borrowing my aunt's car whenever I could—but still didn't trust myself to get a license.

I was panicked that the subject would come up in the interview, and that my dirty secret would be revealed. At best, it meant I'd be missing out on a possible perk of the gig; at worst, I'd be unable to fulfill the job description. When I told my now-boss that I lived near Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the moment arrived.

"That's a nice drive, huh?" he said.

I nodded enthusiastically enough, I hoped, to cut short that particular branch of conversation. I wasn't lying necessarily—I'd seen it through a taxi window after all. Still, it was enough of a shock to the system to jolt me into action. The next day I scheduled my road test. One month, a few pep talks, and about a thousand parallel parking jobs later, I passed.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

This summer, when I went out of town with my parents for our annual escape from the city heat, I let my dad take a turn in the passenger seat. As I sped along highways and took leisurely turns around winding country roads, it became hard to believe that this amazing machine had ever felt like a death trap. Driving, I've happily learned, is fun as hell.